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Odyssia 2016: An 18 Year Celebration Of Greece’s Electrifying Dance Music Scene

Summary/Commentary:

Odyssia is a week long celebration of Cariocas (a beach bar in Greece) with a stacked lineup. This festival is unique from other traditional music festivals considering there is no field, and sets are evenly spaced out at the bar's two stages (and boat) throughout the week. Dive into this article to re-live one festival-goers experience at Odyssia.

As someone who considers himself pretty plugged in to dance music culture, I’m somewhat embarrassed that I had no prior knowledge of Cariocas before I went to cover this festival. Cariocas is a beach bar in Greece, nestled in a stunning, if remote pocket of coastline some 30km from Corinth. Over its 18 year history, it has welcomed an armada of legendary DJs and producers from all over the world, all of whom were capitivated by the beauty of the surroundings and the vibrance of the crowd. Many of them came back for return visits, such as David Morales.

To locals, it’s legendary, but to the further afield it might have been nothing more than a vague notion, a glance-by on Resident Advisor, or even just non-existent. Enter Odyssia, a week long celebration of the bar’s life with a lineup to rival any other dance music festival in Europe or beyond. Although all this was known to me when I made my way down to Greece (having never set foot in the country before), but I was still in traditional British festival mode, tent slung over my back, bum bag prepped, clothes and all other bare neccessities stuffed wherever they would fit.

As I discovered, I had the wrong idea. Odyssia isn’t a festival in the traditional sense, there was no field, no overpriced corporate pop-up bars, no string of weird and wonderful stages to spread the music out. This was all Cariocas, all the time, with the acts spread evenly across 7 days and nights of music on the bar’s two stages (and a boat, but we’ll get to that in a bit). If you were camping, you were staying at a tourist campsite around 15 minutes walk away, otherwise you needed to find accommodation in the nearby port town of Loutraki, which you could reach by taxi or shuttle bus (and over a mountain)...